CEO finds it ‘heartbreaking’ when users learn his company sells their email info

It’s a situation lending more proof to the theory that few people read service agreements online.

Unroll.me, which organizes your email inbox and filters out spam, is getting some collateral backlash after the New York Times published an article looking at Uber’s business practices Sunday. The report revealed that Slice, a shopping app that bought Unroll.me in 2014, sells the email information of their users to Uber, specifically the anonymous Lyft receipts of customers.

“Slice confirmed that it sells anonymized data (meaning that customers’ names are not attached) based on ride receipts from Uber and Lyft, but declined to disclose who buys the information,” the Times report says.

That revelation – and the fact that Unroll.me was selling user information to the very companies some people use the service unsubscribe from – was met with immediate backlash from those who use the filtering system.

Unroll.me’s CEO and co-founder Jojo Hedaya wrote a corporate blogpost responding to the controversy that day, saying it was “heartbreaking to see that some of our users were upset to learn about how we monetize our free service.”

“Sure we have a Terms of Service Agreement and a plain-English Privacy Policy that our users agree they have read and understand before they even sign up, but the reality is most of us – myself included – don’t take the time to thoroughly review them,” Hedaya wrote.

Hedaya promised to be clearer about how the information is sold in the future, but indicated the company’s selling of email data would not change.

This story was originally published April 24, 2017 at 11:14 AM with the headline "CEO finds it ‘heartbreaking’ when users learn his company sells their email info."